MENLO PARK -- Fifteen years after two Stanford grad students launched a company called Google the Internet giant used its first office -- a garage attached to a modest suburban home -- as a stage for showing off the latest upgrades to its famed search engine.

The changes unveiled Thursday include a subtle redesign of the Google mobile apps for Android and Apple devices, intended to make it easier to ask spoken questions in more conversational phrases. In addition, Google can now show comparisons of objects -- such as the nutritional content of different foods, or the characteristics of two planets -- and display samples of songs or works of art in response to a spoken question about a musician or painter.

The house in Menlo Park where Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page once rented the garage and some rooms from Susan Wojcicki. (Brandon Bailey/San Jose Mercury News)

Less obvious, but probably more significant, is a major revamping of the mathematical formula that works behind the scenes to understand questions and provide the best answers Google can find. Google senior vice president Amit Singhal told reporters that the new algorithm represents the biggest change to Google's search formula in three years and was needed because the way people search the Internet is rapidly changing.

Fifteen years ago, "if you wanted to find something, you had to think of the right keywords that would appear on the right Web pages," he said.

But as people have become more comfortable with searching, especially when using voice-activated search, he explained, they are asking questions that are longer and involve more complex concepts. "And our algorithm had to go through some fundamental rethinking of how we are going to keep our results relevant."

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The new algorithm, dubbed Hummingbird, was introduced over the past month, although most casual users probably haven't noticed. Singhal compared the overhaul to switching out jet engines while an airplane is in midflight.

Google used the occasion of its 15th anniversary to talk about how far the company has come since its early days as a project of Stanford grad students Larry Page, now Google's CEO, and Sergey Brin, who oversees such offbeat projects as the wearable Glass device and self-driving cars. But Singhal promised that the company isn't sitting on its laurels. "We know we are just getting started," he told reporters.

While the company was officially incorporated Sept. 4, 1998, Google usually celebrates the anniversary at the end of September, for reasons that seem to have become lost over time.

When Page and Brin started looking for their first off-campus workspace, the dot-com boom was heating up and offices were hard to find. But Susan Wojcicki, then a recent Stanford business school graduate, said she needed help paying her mortgage and offered them her garage and spare rooms.

"At the time I didn't really know what to think about this," Wojcicki said Thursday. Now the company's senior vice president for advertising, Wojcicki recalled how the co-founders and a few employees played pingpong and worked late into the night at her home, which sits on a quiet, leafy residential street in Menlo Park.

In the 15 years since Google entered what was then a crowded field of Internet search engines, the company has become an online behemoth, reporting more than $50 billion in revenue last year. It now handles more than two-thirds of all Internet search queries in the United States, according to the comScore tracking firm. Its nearest competitor, Microsoft's Bing, handles just under 18 percent.

But if Google is the king of search, it only "leases the throne," said Gartner tech analyst Whit Andrews, who warned that Google faces continued competition from Apple's voice-activated Siri, Facebook's internal search service and even IBM's Watson computer.

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